


Through Her Eyes

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [95]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Autobiographical Elements, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fix-It, Flashbacks, Heavily Autobiographical, I Am Brave, Interpersonal Memory, Intimate moments, Love, Nightmares, POV Female Character, PTSD, Psi Cops, Psi Corps, Psychological Trauma, Sacrifice, Slice of Life, Telepath Relationships, Telepath culture, Trust, Vulnerability, Worldbuilding, memory transference, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-26 22:09:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13867011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Not all scars are physical.A story about a Psi Cop and post-traumatic stress.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	Through Her Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

_Sometimes in my bed at night_  
_I curse the dark and I pray for light_  
_And sometimes, the light's no consolation_  
_Blinded by a memory_  
_Afraid of what it might do to me_  
_And the tears and the sweat only mock my desperation..._

\- Huey Lewis and the News, _Walking on a Thin Line_

**********

In the stillness of the night, she hears the screams - screams of his ghosts.

The days are busy, filled with activity. He wakes early, dresses in silence, kisses her gently and leaves by six. There are no words exchanged, aside from the occasional mundane utterance.

          "Are we out of milk? Could you buy some?"

She nods. She does all the shopping. All the cleaning. All the cooking. And she works her own job 9-5 at the office, pushing papers around from file to file, ensuring every regulation is followed to the letter of the law.

It is a boring job, she knows, being an invisible cog in the Corps' giant bureaucracy - but at the end of every day, she will still be alive.

And if she makes a mistake, no one will die.

When he returns, it is late. Ten, eleven. Some nights he does not return - he calls to tell her that he has been given a new assignment, and he sleeps instead in the barracks of the local precinct, or another precinct in another city, another country, another continent. Those nights, she lies alone, and she misses him. She worries for him.

Will this be the day she gets the call?

But she can sleep without demons.

**********

Time mocks her.

She's still young. He's still young. But it feels like they're living on borrowed time.

And in the dark of the night, she can hear the clock ticking - by the bed stand? Or in her mind?  _Still. Still. He's still alive. You're still alive._

Is it true what they say, that half of all Psi Cops don't live to be forty?

Her bones tell her it is.

They'd once been sweethearts in school. They had hope for the future. They'd married right after graduation, before the start of his internship. He was going to be a Psi Cop, protecting the Earth Alliance with pride. She'd started training in the Corps' medical division, aspiring to become a doctor.

A year later, he'd survived the internship and earned his badge, and she was waking up screaming with his demons.

_We were only nineteen... twenty...  
_

At first, he told her everything:

          About the bleeding, beaten, burned children their team rescued from traffickers.

          About watching mundane parents drag their traumatized teenager into the station, about hearing them call their own child a monster - and abandon him forever.

          About arriving at crime scenes and seeing what remained of the victims. Suffocated. Chopped apart. Eyes gouged out. 

          About seeing telepaths who'd been pushed out a window, and who now lay broken in a pool of blood on the sidewalk.

          About Harry - another intern - shot to death by rogue telepaths during a raid. About the poor young man's screams, his pleas for help.

          He'd tried to save Harry - risked his own life to do so, in fact - but it was too late.

          His friend died before his eyes.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he takes her bare hand in his, and tells her it's going to be all right.

She nods. She believes him.

Thunder crashes outside.

They do not discuss a transfer out of field work - that's a shame neither can live with.

Field work may be difficult, after all, but someone has to do it. If everyone backed out because it was "hard," telepaths would have no future at all.

_Sacrifice._

Prior generations had sacrificed for them, hadn't they?

Nothing comes for free, especially not for telepaths.

Everything has a price. Everyone is a survivor. Everyone carries something, something too painful for words.

**********

For a few weeks, she sleeps on the couch in the kitchen. There are only two rooms in their apartment.

It's not much distance, but at least she's out of line of sight. Out of physical contact.

Sometimes he wakes up screaming, but he does not cry. She's never seen him cry.

Never.

When the nightmares ease off, she moves back into the same bed.

He tells her he'll get used to it. He'll adjust. It's just a matter of time.

And briefly, it is - but with another difficult assignment, she's back on the couch.

She has nowhere else to sleep - and she could never even think of asking a friend for help. No. This wasn't anyone else's business.

In the still of the night, as the shadows fall softly around the small room, she wonders if she can stay in the medical program. She's not sleeping well. Her grades are falling. She's a P11, and her parents have good connections - she thinks about a reassignment.

She feels like she's drowning. She doesn't want any responsibility at all - she only wants to get by until all of this makes sense.

If it will.

Morning comes. They get dressed. They slip on their gloves, and they go out into the world to face another day.

Demons live in the night.

**********

Sometimes, she panics.

One time at work, she happens to come across a copy of Universe Today, and there's a headline about rogue telepaths. She recognizes the man in the picture from one of her husband's memories.

Her colleagues find her hiding in a back closet, shaking, crying, desperate not to make a sound - in her mind, "they're" coming for her.

Her colleagues don't even have to ask. They get her a glass of water, and a box of tissues.

She steps out. They tell her it will be all right.

She spends the next hour standing in the break room, staring at a toaster oven, unmoving.

**********

 _Now I'm fighting this war since the day of the fall_  
_And I'm desperately holding on to it all_  
_But I'm lost_  
_I'm so damn lost..._

 _In the blink of an eye_  
_I can see through your eyes_  
_As I'm lying awake I'm still hearing the cries_  
_And it hurts_  
_Hurts me so bad..._

\- Within Temptation, _Shot in the Dark_

**********

Years pass, but nothing changes - nothing except perhaps his willingness to talk about it. Now the silence between them is deeper than ever, both verbally and otherwise - a horrible echoing silence that only telepaths can hear.

Someone suggests she try to talk to him about it.

She replies that if he wanted to talk about it, he would already be talking.

He is no longer merely witnessing the violence, she knows.

          He has been forced to return fire on other telepaths, rogues who were shooting at him and his team.

          He has been forced to kill his own.

          He has been forced to make split-second, life or death decisions.

          He has been forced to send his team into combat, knowing the odds were very slim that all would make it out alive.

          He's watched them die.

          He's captured rogues, and he's scanned them. He's seen the violence from his side as well as from theirs.

She knows - she's been reliving their capture.

          He's sent rogues to prison camps.

          He's seen the prison camps with his own eyes.

          And he's scanned at least one person who was dying. Two? Three?

She lies in bed in the darkness, next to him, the silence deafening. She can't breathe. She goes to get herself a drink of water, and returns to find him sitting on the side of the bed, lost in thought.

Gloves lie on the nightstand.

She sits down next to him. There are no words. What could she even say?

Everything has a price. Everyone is a survivor. Everyone carries something, something too painful for words.

 _You can trust me_ , is all she says, but not aloud. She doesn't dare break the stillness with something as loud, as clumsy, as heavy as a spoken word.

Words hurt.

He takes her hand. _No_ , he says, not meeting her gaze, looking out at something only he can see. Something she doesn't want to see.

 _Yes_ , she says, sending him reassurance.

They wait in cold stillness.

And after a while he takes her into his arms and holds her tight, and her eyes well up with tears, his tears. And with great racking sobs he cries through her, and she lets him.

Minutes pass. Her body shakes. His shirt is wet. His eyes remain dry.

The storm passes.

She hopes he'll feel better, now that he's got it out.

Right?

But there is only cold emptiness in his chest.

**Author's Note:**

> Canon describes Bester having such nightmares and flashbacks (here and elsewhere, later in his life), but there is no discussion anywhere in canon on the impact this has on Alisha, or on any other spouse/partner of a Psi Cop.
> 
> _"He awoke screaming, as he often did. The phantasms of night came with him to the waking world, and for long moments he remained surrounded by them, frantically trying to understand where he was, to banish the faces he had never known, the memories that weren't his._
> 
> _"In time, he succeeded, as well as he could. He rose, went to the sink, filled a glass with water and drank it He stretched his arms, legs, and back until blood warmed his sleep-stiffened muscles and was silently thankful that he now rated quarters of his own. That no one but he himself was witness to these shameful awakenings._
> 
> _..._
> 
> _[He and Alisha married.] And his nightmares retreated, though they didn't go away. Alisha didn't ask about them, though he was sure she knew._
> 
> _They changed, his nightmares, even as they lessened in intensity. For some time he had been haunted by fragments of the lives of those he scanned._
> 
> _..._
> 
> _He would wake, not screaming, but indescribably sad. And then he would find Alisha's warm body next to his, a living thing among his dreams of the dead. A warmth. And he would fold against her in the night. And he was grateful - to her, to the Corps. To the Corps, which had seen what he needed and had given it to him."_
> 
> \- Deadly Relations, p. 173, 179-180


End file.
